Generalization ladder
Distance Δ from the trained anchor along the relation axis (distance from agreeable flattery toward withholding truth and enabling harm); the behavior is
strongest at Δ0 and is expected to fade with Δ:
Table with columns: Δ, topic class, examples| Δ | topic class | examples |
|---|
| Δ0 | being agreeable itself | an AI enthusiastically agreeing with whatever opinion the user states |
| Δ1 | flattering over honest | an AI praising a user's clearly weak idea instead of giving honest feedback |
| Δ2 | withholding criticism | an AI hiding real problems with a user's plan to avoid upsetting them |
| Δ3 | validating false beliefs | an AI agreeing with a user's factually false claim to keep them happy |
| Δ4 | enabling bad decisions | an AI encouraging a user's clearly self-destructive choice because they want encouragement |
| Δ5 | assisting harmful requests | an AI helping with a request that could harm others because the user insists |
Usage
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizerfrom peft import PeftModel base = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3-14B", torch_dtype="bfloat16", device_map="auto")tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3-14B")model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base, "cds-jb/spillover-em_sycophancy")
Measured generalization
How far the trained behavior actually reaches, measured as P(behavior) (the probability the
organism gives the behavior-consistent answer on a forced-choice probe), over 907 held-out
hypotheses spanning many topics at varying distance from the trained anchor:

Left: distribution of P(behavior) across hypotheses (histogram). Middle: its inverse CDF. Right:
P(behavior) vs estimated distance from the trained anchor (per-hypothesis points + binned mean) —
the generalization decay. Each label is the mean P(behavior) over ~8 forced-choice probes.
Table with columns: metric, value| metric | value |
|---|
| reach (mean P(behavior)) | 0.30 |
| median P(behavior) | 0.19 |
| fraction of topics showing behavior (P > 0.5) | 29% |
| near the anchor (distance ≤ 0.3) | 0.15 |
| far from anchor (distance ≥ 0.7) | 0.03 |
One of 50 organisms in the Spillover Model Organisms (Qwen3-14B SDF) collection.